R.I.P. textdrive.com

03 Apr 2014filed under: computing

Up until recently, I had a little Wordpress blog that I hosted
using a sevice called Textdrive. Textdrive was a nice, simple
Unix-based hosting solution that, prior to Joyent’s purchase
of the company, provided great value for $15/mo. But sometime about
a week ago, the lights went dark. At this point I should mention
that this was no longer Joyent’s company. While Joyent seems to be
focusing on major cloud services, the Textdrive of late was a reboot
of the original shared-hosting provider, catering to the low-end.

The bankruptcy of a startup is not unusual, especially one catering
to the low-margin side of a line of business, but what is unusual
is how the company managed to shut down without even emailing any
of its customers. I literally found out about the shutdown by
attempting (and failing) to contact my server, only days after it
had apparently been wiped clean. Apparently a notice had been posted
to their support forums, which is a bizarre substitute for notifying
one’s customer base. I can’t imagine what the explanation for all
of this is, but it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

An amusing side note is that had I been an up-to-date reader of
Wired Magazine, I might have read this article about how
my hosting provider had gone out of business. And had I done so,
I would have known a full month before someone came in and shut off
the lights.